Honey Gupta of Noida started his B2B (business-to-business) lead generating business in 2011, around the time when e-commerce was about to dig its nails in the growing internet space. MyCityCue.com, Gupta’s company was a lead-generating website that listed manufacturers, sellers, and traders of all kinds of products free of cost. Gupta’s company promoted the listings online to generate leads and sell those leads to buyers including IndiaMART.
Gupta told Financial express that everything was going great and the company had around 150-200 customers every month. But things changed all of sudden as the end of 2011 approached.
In the February of the same year, Google had updated its algorithm that decided the ranking of websites on the Google search result page. Google intended to improve the quality and quantity of content on websites. This change was implemented all over the world by the end of the year and affected the rank of many websites.
Gupta explained how this algorithm change affected his business, “We realized something was going wrong within 15-20 days. Cataloging companies like ours that were not content friendly at that time and depended on the listings part only. B2B listing companies like us used to put two-three lines of information about the product and company along with contact details. All rankings and SEO optimization vanished within around two to three weeks. Our advertising revenue dropped drastically.”
Now Gupta was at crossroads. It was on him to decide between overhauling the entire website and rebuilding the websites or just shutting the company altogether. The former option required a lot of money. Gupta claimed that the capital needed to rebuild the company was much more than the monthly revenue and that no investor would be interested in putting money into it. And so Gupta let go of MycityCue.com by 2012. Gupta took up a job for 3 years before making a comeback to entrepreneurship with Truphe.
Gupta chose gardening tools to venture into and in the next 7 years expanded the business to selling seeds, pots, and soil ingredients as well. Currently, Gupta is retailing through his company website, Amazon and Flipkart. Gupta aims to expand Truphe to other products such as lawnmowers and chainsaws as well. Truphe raised undisclosed funding from UpScalio last month to scale the business revenue to 50 crores in the next two years.
